Cesspool of ready to be demolished cars. The city from afar looks like a mushroom of black cloud, caused by smog. The business of automobiles and spare parts is possibly Senegal's only legal commerce engine, so to speak.. The fact is cars that are illegal in possibly all other continents apart from Africa end up here for usage. And though the rest of the world after renewing their pollution free cars, automobiles in Africa, that originate from industrialized countries, are deteriorating the world's atmosphere nonetheless.
It is shocking for both of us to arrive in a traffic that lasted from 70kms from the center city, on 'deflowered' roads and in the midst on a merry hydrocarbonoxmonodioxidian exhaust emission party.
Our goal is to arrive in time for my flight at 1am for my return to Milan, already one day late.
The sun starts to set at 6.30pm when our Honda, that has pulled through approximately 550km with more or less 250 kgs of weight, blew a tire. We were in the outskirts of Dakar about 40 kms away from the airport with no money and I feared to have maxed out with credit card, so Red had to come with to be sure that all was good.
It took us an hour and a half after asking around, being refused, and pushing around the motorcycle for a few kms to find finally a person who can fix the tire, in the backside of this shanty town raised on the strip of asphalt that leads to Dakar. The boys worked on sand and took more than an hour to change the tire. In the meantime, I was in the midst of continuous messaging with a friend in Vienna to book the flight, Red was involved in transactions for the purchase of the scooter and eventually a trade with a barter that includes yours truly..
Turns out that the next flight was at 6.30AM.
We had more time that night which was spent on going back and forth to the 'mechanic', finding a hostel that was decent, and sleeping less than 3 hours before waking up and going to the airport.
I don't exactly know why but we were really picky that night with choosing sleep quarters more than usual and we were actually more tired than usual. However, I can only defend myself by underlining the difficulty between accepting what's available rather than accepting what is embarrassing.
Between a hotel with not-so-warm water with little pressure in a hotel that physically looks like shit since it was brown all over and smelled, and another hotel than was youthful, seemed clean but had the john and shower closed partially by a wall a.k.a. completely visible, I had to chose where I'd have more privacy when doing my business with the flush toilet.
We ended up sleeping at past midnight.
Me, all washed and Red, brown like the sheets of his bed.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment